IS BARBARA KINGSOLVER’S THE POISONWOOD BIBLE A “POSTCOLONIAL” NOVEL?
In a National Public Radio interview American writer Barbara Kingsolver made what struck me as a rather remarkable assertion: namely that her 1998 novel, The Poisonwood Bible, is part of “the postcolonial tradition,” which she said is a tradition “we’ve inherited” (Interview with Michael Kransey). This caught my attention for three reasons. First, it never occurred to me to consider postcolonial writing a “tradition” in any sense of the word as I understand it. Second, I was mildly amused at the idea of a white American, who has lived her entire life in relative affluence, claiming for herself the mantle of postcoloniality. Hers, after all, is not the sort of background one normally associates with the term—though, theoretically, I see no reason why that should automatically exclude her. And finally, I wondered if a text by such a writer, which focuses on characters representative of the American cultural majority, could or should indeed be considered “postcolonial”? Judging simply from the political positions it stakes out vis-à-vis European colonialism and American hegemony in Africa, Kingsolver’s text certainly feels postcolonial. It is therefore tempting to regard it as such. And, a cursory search of the internet reveals that the author is not alone in considering her novel “postcolonial”.1 However, when subjected to a postcolonial reading it seems to me the text fails to live up to either the author’s noble intentions or the postcolonial reader’s expectations.